The Chestnut of Park Arentsburg

When a Dutch horse chestnut looks scorched in August, the summer is not to blame. A moth called the horse chestnut leaf miner reached the country around the turn of the century, its caterpillars tunnel between the layers of every leaf, and whole crowns go brown months early. Add bleeding canker, which has killed chestnuts across the Netherlands since the 2000s, and an old one is less common than it used to be. The national register dates this tree's planting to between 1860 and 1870, so roughly 160 years, standing near the Den Burgstraat edge of Park Arentsburg. The species is not Dutch and never was. It comes from a few mountain valleys in the Balkans, arrived in western Europe as a curiosity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and went on to become the tree of avenues, school yards and city squares. The best known one in this country, the chestnut Anne Frank could see from the back annexe in Amsterdam, came down in a storm in 2010. The week to come is in early May, when the flowers go up across the whole crown in white spikes and the tree turns briefly ridiculous. Late September brings conkers instead. Park Arentsburg is in Voorburg, part of the municipality of Leidschendam-Voorburg, east of The Hague rather than inside it.